Parent Engagement in Learning

Parents can facilitate children’s educational success by engaging in interactive activities with the child, emphasizing the importance of school and education, and conveying expectations and interest regarding children’s academic achievement.

Parents should actively engage with their children to support their education.

Parents, even if they are not educated or literate, can play an important role in enhancing the education of their children at home.

Research in developed countries has demonstrated that parental engagement with children at home results in large improvements in student performance, with promising applications to developing country contexts.

Communicate to parents the benefits of actively engaging with their young children.

Parents may not see the benefits of engaging in their child’s education, especially if they themselves have limited schooling. The benefits of this interaction should be communicated clearly and without making parents feel defensive or guilty.

Learn about this program, which is a low-cost home-based program for mothers whose children do not have access to pre-school education services and found that it is important to communicate to parents the value of engaging with their children in a way that does not make them feel defensive or guilty.

This is a brochure for parents that explains using pictures and simple text the importance of reading with children and tips for parents to read with their children, even if the parent is not literate.

This manual guides facilitators through parent training to encourage and empower them to read with their children; includes activities, discussion topics, and techniques for active reading and story-telling.

Provide simple materials and activities to guide parents as they engage with their children.

Implementers should provide parents guidance for simple activities to do with their children, like asking children about their school day, as well as supporting materials, like charts to mark a child’s progress.

Session 6 (pages 121-141) of this guide provides examples of activities that facilitators can do with parents of very young children to encourage them to support their child’s intellectual development.

Booklet 9 (page 135) of this guidebook provides parents with information on what children should be able to do when they start school, and how parents can help support their children's development; the guidebook is available in English and 6 other languages.

Facilitators of programs aiming to foster parent-child interaction should be knowledgeable about parenting and given continuous supervision and support. Some characteristics of good facilitators include flexibility, strong communication skills, and empathy.

This handbook provides guidance on leading workshops for parents on supporting the development of their children; Part 1 (page 29) describes interactive strategies for working with parents; Workshop 9 (starting on page 143) focuses specifically on activities for leading effective parent workshops on the topic of supporting children's education.

Section 3 of this Resource Pack (page 17) describes key messages for communicating with parents about parental support strategies, as well as best practices like providing a resource center for parents, making sure to include fathers and grandparents, ongoing support for parents via mobile phone, and the creation of parent groups.

This is a manual for facilitators of parent programs in Africa (though applicable to developing countries more widely); includes facilitator planning guides and handouts around key topics such as appropriate parental support for different stages in children's lives; also includes home assignments and parent reflection forms.

This framework provides examples of practices, challenges, and expected results in each of the 6 areas of family involvement: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community.

MOCEP is a low-cost home-based program for mothers whose children do not have access to pre-school education services. The program empowers mothers by supporting them in their parenting roles and equipping them with the knowledge and the tools necessary for fostering the cognitive development of their children.

Early Inspiration is an intervention program that provides training and support for parents and early childhood development practitioners to maximize young children's learning and social adjustment capabilities in South Africa.

This evaluation of an intervention to improve mothers’ literacy and the home learning environment through literacy classes and training for mothers found that children of mothers in treatment groups scored higher on math tests than their control group counterparts.

From a meta-analysis of quantitative studies on the effect of parental involvement on children’s academic achievement, the authors find a moderate relationship between the two factors, with parental expectations for children’s education achievement having the strongest relationship with academic achievement.

This study found that home-based parental involvement, which includes monitoring homework completion and discussing academic expectations, was associated with higher academic performance, while school-based engagement had a negative association.

By combining results from 14 intervention studies that included parent-child activities that focus on reading, the authors find that parental involvement has a positive impact on children’s reading outcomes; having parents teach specific literacy skills was more effective than having parents listen to their children read, which in turn was more effective than having parents read to their children.

This review of the literature on parental and family engagement shows that the majority of studies on the topic have found parental involvement in the home to have positive impacts on children’s learning outcomes.